


Transportation

by thewordweaves



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: But Still Manages To Be A Perfectly Lovely Person Anyway, Character Study, Corpses, Dissection, Gen, Gen Fic, In Which Molly Hooper Likes Dissecting Things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-17
Updated: 2012-04-17
Packaged: 2017-11-03 19:51:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/385249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewordweaves/pseuds/thewordweaves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Done for the kink meme prompt: 'Give me a 'normal ' character- Molly, Lestrade, Sally. And then give them something abnormal. Because Sherlock isn't the only one who doesn't adhere to obvious moral rules.'</p>
<p> Molly Hooper is and has always been a sweet, helpful woman with a penchant for the colour pink, cats and bad telly. But Molly Hooper is and has always been fascinated by corpses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Transportation

**Author's Note:**

> In case the tags didn't clue you in, this fic will not contain violence, but it will contain descriptions of corpses, one of which being a bird. Consider yourself warned!

The first time Molly saw a dead body, she was nine years old. At first it had seemed quite ordinary,, just like the rest of her. She loved her parents and the colour pink like the other girls her age, and all of her teachers had always agreed that she was eager to please and gentle in her demeanor, with an ever growing curiosity for the world around her, a bit shy perhaps, but a perfectly good girl besides. It was in the spirit of curiosity that when the dead bird had been placed at the foot of her bed by Etta, her cat, Molly bent down to look at it instead of immediately shying away or tossing it in the bin. If anyone had asked her before, Molly would have said that she loved animals. She _did_ love animals. Etta had always been her sole confidant, and it had always pleased her whenever she had the opportunity to pet any of the small dogs on her street, all wagging tails and big eyes, and she even liked her friend’s budgie even if it had a tendency to bite any wiggling fingers that came its way.

But this was just a pigeon, and a dead one at that. It was possible, Molly considered, that it hardly counted as an animal at all. There was nothing she could do to hurt it. It was _dead_. She had learned a bit about birds in school, things about hollow bones and feathers and different beaks to eat different things, but they never got to learn about what was on the inside. She reached a finger out and stroked the bird down its punctured chest. She wanted to see. She had watched her Mum cut apart chickens before, but to her massive disappointment, they always seemed to take all the interesting bits out first. Absently, she lifted one of its wings and noticed that it was bent at an odd angle, which explained how Etta managed to get her claws on such a large bird.

She wouldn't get another chance. Molly took a deep breath and made up her mind. Heart pounding madly away in her chest, she grabbed one of the serrated knives from the cutlery drawer and solemnly rolled up the sleeves of her lavender jumper up to the crook of her elbows, then tucked her long hair into her sweater. After a moment of thought, the pigeon was set on one of the old, tattered towels that ought to have been thrown out ages ago, the one her Mum generally used to dye her hair. Molly had always been a considerate child after all, and she knew that it wouldn't do to make a mess of things.

The task turned out to be more difficult than initially anticipated. Sawing away at it was an arduous, messy task, but the feathered skin eventually peeled away to reveal the breastbone. Excitement rose deep inside her with the sudden realization that she was going to be able to see what was inside of a living creature for the first time. The breastbone was difficult to break, but the insistent weight of her thumb combined with the kitchen knife split it messily open to reveal what she had wanted to see all along.

It was breathtaking. And it smelled bad, but she could shove that to the back of her mind in the name of further inquiry. The bird's innards were a mess of red and brown and grey, utterly indiscernible from one another. Nothing did quite make sense the way it did when people were explaining the human body on the telly. They had done bodies an injustice, Molly realized, with their sharp, solid lines and steady ropes of red and blue and their well defined boundaries. This was far more magnificent, far more complicated. How amazing it was, to know that something could be powered by this mess of things in front of her, things she didn't understand but desperately wanted to. With trembling, clumsy fingers, she spread everything further apart and dragged bits and pieces out of the cadaver. They were so much bigger on the inside. Everything was. 

The only thing she could identify with any measure of accuracy was its heart. And oh, how small it was! She fished it out and held it carefully in the palm of her hand. This was it. This was what powered everything, that's what everybody said. Almost instinctively, she pressed her free hand to her own chest, heedless of the damp of blood and juices she was pushing into her jumper. Molly couldn't remember ever feeling more amazed. For the first time in her life, everything made perfect sense. It boiled down to this little bird's heart in her hand, and the heart in her chest, one beating and one not, such a small thing that bridged the gap between life and death.

Which was when her mother walked through the door, only to see little, sweet, hard-working Molly Hooper sitting on the ground of her bedroom, face flush, a grin on her face and eyes bright, a beacon of light among the soaked towels with a heart grasped in her small hand. When Molly saw her mother's face, her own smile faded, and it was as if her mother's tightly clenched fist contained Molly's own heart.

"Molly!" Her mother said, leaning against the doorframe in a moment of weakness before taking two quick strides towards her daughter and slapping the heart out of her hand. It tumbled back onto the bird's cadaver, the magic suddenly sapped from it. Molly wasn't sure which was worse for a moment, the loss of the heart or the painful realization that her mother had never slapped her before this one, wonderful moment.

Molly stared at her in frank incomprehension until it finally clicked. "Oh! Mum, it's okay. It was already dead. Etta found it."

But that didn't make anything better. If anything, her mother looked more aghast, the once unflappable woman suddenly too flustered to speak, white faced and swaying and dry heaving and Molly didn't understand, didn't understand at all how something so amazing could make her own mother look as if the world had just been yanked from underneath her feet.

The knife, the towels, the bird and every article of clothing Molly had worn were quickly thrown out and she was sent off to bathe in water so hot that it felt as if it were burning her skin off, though there was no way to know whether her skin had turned red because of the heat or because of the way her mother frantically scrubbed at her, continuing long after every trace of viscera had disappeared down the drain. Molly didn’t dare ask, and her mother didn’t say a word.

Her parents had sent her to a therapist after that, but it had only lasted a few sessions. Molly was ordinary, the therapist had said with a shrug. Keep an eye on her. Molly still didn’t understand why it was fine to eat chicken for supper, but to crack open its corpse to look at what was inside was wicked, but she kept that to herself. It was better that way, to act as if she was as normal as she usually felt. Anything was better than seeing that look on her mother’s face, her mouth opening and closing mutely, eyes begging _please let this not be happening_.

(To act the part was never the same as being the part. She never stopped dissecting dead animals when she found them. She simply became more skilled at covering her tracks.)

*

The first time Molly saw a human corpse, she was thirteen years old. This time, it wasn’t an occasion that she would get in trouble for, but an occasion of grief. Her grandmother had died. She had broken her hip, and that was the end of it, everyone was saying, but that wasn’t really the end of it. The broken hip had just been the beginning of it before it dissolved into hospital visit after hospital visit, eyes once sharp gone milky with pain and age and a mind too addled with drugs to recognize what was happening, the litany of doctors and nurses and pills and machines and pain, pain, pain. Pity, everyone had said, over and over again, such a pity. But Molly had sat and thought and wondered how it was that her insides could just stop, sat and thought and wondered about the drugs, about the hospital, about how it all worked.

Her father had cried. That was the first time she had ever seen that happen, and after patting his hand and pretending she didn’t notice his tears like he wanted her to, she went up to her room and cried as any dutiful granddaughter would. She would miss her Gran, truly she would, but her Gran hadn’t been there for a year now. The woman that had been there, full of wit and spark and life, that was who Molly cried for, and she cried for her father’s shaking hands, and she cried for her mother’s worried face, and she cried for herself as well, of the hole in her life that her Gran had inhabited.

She cried at the funeral as well, but only for a moment, for she felt she had exhausted her supply of tears long ago. For the bulk of the time, she simply sat there and listened to everyone speak, her insides rolling inside her, aware of every beat of her heart and every throb of her head, the scratch of her sweater against her arms and the weight of the dress shoes on her feet, everything her Gran couldn’t feel anymore. A soft touch on her stockinged knee yanked her out of herself, and the worried face of her mother bobbed into view. “Mol,” she said, “we’re going up to see her. You don’t have to.”

This was the part she had been waiting for. She would cry, she expected, like everyone did in the novels she read. She would cry and think about how pale the corpse was and how empty and see a glimmer of Gran there, and she wanted to see that, wanted to feel that. So instead, she said, “No, I’ll go,” and gave her Mum a tight lipped smile.

“There’s my girl,” her mother said softly, and led the way over to the open coffin. 

Molly followed and looked down into the coffin. She waited for it to come. Everyone else had seemed to see something holy, to feel something holy, to know that there was still an essence of the person inside of the corpse. Molly closed her eyes, willing herself to feel the familiar prickling of tears behind her eyelids. She opened them again. Lying in front of her was a hundred pounds of flesh and bone and disused muscle. Powder gave the body a healthier complexion than what it had in life, and Molly traced the lines of her knotted fingers with her eyes. She found her gaze drawn to the slack, thin lips decorated prettily with lipstick and her jaw worked as she touched each of her own teeth with her tongue.

Behind her, her mother said to her aunt in a hushed voice, “Molly has always been such a sensitive child, poor thing.”

Perhaps she was sensitive. But at this time, in this place, she didn’t feel a thing.

*

At seventeen years of age, Molly was a champion of not drawing attention to herself. Odd, but not odd enough to warrant any extra attention, she crept just beneath notice of anyone who meant anything at all. She knew what they thought of her. A bit mousy, a bit awkward, a bit shy, dumpy sense of fashion, but harmless enough and certainly not strange enough to pick out of a crowd. She had a couple of friends to eat with during breaks, and that was all she really needed. It wasn’t necessarily what she wanted. If she had it her way, she’d probably be tall and fetching like Charlotte, who was all full lips and dark hair and any boy worth fancying (and boys that Molly did indeed fancy) had his eye on her.

But because she was Molly Hooper, a cheerful existence just under the radar was all she could ever hope for. She took Biology classes every semester, and her father had taken to wrapping his arm around her and saying, _we call her_ Doctor _Hooper_ and grinning goofily, and that was all right. She could probably be a doctor. The idea of dealing with patients was enough to make her insides twist unpleasantly, but she could probably become a vet, which was a perfectly respectable profession as well. Then came the uneasy thought of ah, but you don’t like seeing animals hurt, do you?

Molly tried to ignore that one. It was easy, being future Doctor Hooper. It wasn’t very easy being Molly Can’t-Get-A-Boyfriend-And-Incidentally-Quite-Likes-To-Dissect-Dead-Things Hooper. It was fine. Nobody needed to know about the oddness in her and the fact that sometimes she wondered if she was missing something and that other times she thought maybe she just had something extra to her. She could build a life for herself and talk about healing things and a comfortable life and the things she ought to want and pretend that she didn’t still remember the pigeon on her bedroom floor and the gasping, stuttering realization of how amazing it was, that you could be alive one second and dead the next, that you could be an object as easily as you were a person. 

Nobody needing to know wasn’t at all like nobody actually knowing, however. In Biology, one of the compulsory activities was the dissection of a pig fetus, something that the class had voiced distaste over more than once. Molly had been looking forward to it all year long. In trundled Mrs. Davis with her too-bright lipstick and rigid smile that honestly looked more like rigor mortis than amusement and the on-again-off-again wedding ring same as always, except for this time those long fingers (no wedding ring today) were clamped down on a box full of pig fetuses. The students all crowded round despite themselves, and Molly had to interlock her fingers quite tightly to restrain her excitement at the sight of a dozen perfect little bodies sealed in tight packages, hooves curling neatly into the dip of the other pigs’ stomachs as if that was exactly where they belonged.

When the students were shooed back to their seats, Mrs. Davis announced, “Now, we’ve got one extra specimen and an odd number of students in the class. One of you is going to have to do this on your own. Hurry up, now, we haven’t got all class!”

Molly held her breath and forced herself to count to five so she didn’t seem too overeager. The class fell into a hush in a way that only happened when everyone was desperately trying to avoid the teacher’s eye in case she misjudged the simple act of observation for volunteering. She put up her hand and tried to sound reluctant when she said, “I will.”

Try as she might, Molly couldn’t quite restrain the smile that spread across her lips as she made the first neat incision. It was so small compared to a fully grown pig, but it was the biggest thing she had ever gotten the opportunity to dissect properly. The worksheet sat discarded to her left, fairly useless for her purposes; she could answer those questions in her sleep. Carefully, she peeled apart the flesh and savoured the unwrapping, the ability to see what such a small thing could hold.

“Ew, Molly’s _smiling_!” A loud voice interrupted, and Molly froze to look across the classroom to meet the eyes of a girl whose name she had forgotten. All she knew was that this girl often seemed to be under the impression that if you said something loud enough, it somehow became true. Stupid people followed that practice more often than note, Molly privately thought, but that was a matter for a different time.

“I was--I was not,” she stammered automatically.

“Yes you were.” There was a definite hint of malicious intent in her voice now. “That’s so gross.”

The right thing to do here, Molly thought, was to duck her head and ignore it, and everyone would forget it eventually. Nobody in the class was particularly cruel, save for this one girl, but they regarded the happenings with the open curiosity of the very bored. Fights were decent entertainment to break up the monotony of the day and made for wonderful gossip to share in the next period. Instead of doing the safe thing, she met the other girl’s eyes and said: “Why?”

“Because it’s dead.” As if that explained everything. To most people, Molly had gathered, it did. But not to her. Never to her.

“It’s just a pig,” Molly said, setting down her scalpel with exaggerated precision. “It being dead doesn’t change anything.”

The matter was dropped quickly and forgotten by most of them, but Molly didn’t forget the pregnant pause that had followed her words and the way her classmates had looked at her, as if they were only just seeing her for the first time. Maybe they were. She still enjoyed dissecting the pig, but not as much as she had anticipated she would.

At least the pig was simple. A collection of muscles and organs, a series of pieces that could be calculated and added to be made up into a whole. Molly wasn’t entirely certain what she should make of being more comfortable around dead things than living ones. It was the sort of thing you read about in the papers when talking about grisly murders, but Molly was no murderer. She just liked to learn. There shouldn’t be anything wrong with that, but as she was quickly learning, there was.

*

When Molly finally stumbled across her first prematurely killed cadaver, she was nineteen years old, in university to become a doctor and finally succeeding at fitting in. Everyone in the university was just as eager as her to make friends, and she had finally seemed to find her way around the eternal mystery of eyeliner. She had been going to a pub for a few drinks with friends when she saw someone slumped in the alleyway. Curiosity took over common sense temporarily, and she walked over to see someone about her age, with a handsome face lying smashed against the trash can and legs splayed awkwardly out it front of him.

And dead. Very dead. It was generally considered to be an impossible feat to remain alive with your belly cut open like that. Fear was her first instinct and she wheeled around, pepperspray a reassuring weight in the pocket of her purse, but the culprit had to be long gone by now. Nevertheless, she held her breath and trembled and waited. When nobody made themselves immediately known, she called an ambulance and stood and waited in front of the corpse. A part of her recognized the fact that she was standing beside a dead body, one killed violently at that, and felt very little at all. The act itself was a heinous one, and the idea of it happening to her or someone she knew was enough to make her heart constrict uncomfortably, but the corpse itself was just that. It had been a person once. It wasn’t anymore. She stared at it and drew diagrams in her mind, didn’t think about who he was or what he was doing, thought _epidermis, hemoglobin, keratin_. Beautiful. But what of the soul? Scientists had asked, philosophers had asked, even her own Mum had asked upon reading a particularly moving book. Molly looked at the corpse and could only thing, _What of it?_

A scream of sirens heralded the arrival of the ambulance and a slew of police cars and Molly found herself being beckoned off to the side for questioning. They asked her entirely too many questions, and she knew the answer to none of them, which they seemed to know already. The man in charge - she didn’t quite catch his title so she settled for calling him _sir_ , which was a nice, safe term - shrugged helplessly at her as if to say that he was only doing what he had to do. He had a bit of a manic look about him, with dark circles under his eyes and a tremble in his hands that Molly tended to associate with drinking too much coffee while studying for exams. 

Finally he patted her on the shoulder and said, “You’ve been very brave.”

It occurred to Molly that she was meant to be a bit more hysterical than this. Possibly in shock. Was shock a thing that happened to people who found dead bodies? She settled for studiously staring at the ground and smiling her twitchy little smile that she honestly felt a bit self conscious about, but it was rather silly to feel self conscious about your smile at a crime scene, wasn’t it? The corpse certainly didn’t care what she looked like.

What did people do with the corpse afterwards?

Summoning up her courage, she asked, “Um. What do you do with it? The body, I mean.”

The policeman looked surprised. “After we inspect the crime scene, it will be sent to the morgue for further investigation.”

“That’s somebody’s job? To look at corpses all day?” 

The policeman smiled congenially at her, mistaking her interest for disgust. “Someone’s got to do it. I’m just glad it isn’t me.” His eyes flicked over her outfit, clearly taking in the fact that she had been off to go out for a few drinks at the very least. “Have you got a way home? One of my men can drop you off.”

Molly tittered nervously and said, “Yes, thank you. I don’t feel much like being out anymore.”

The policewoman who took her home made small talk the entire time. She was sharp but very kind and was obviously trying to cater to a frightened young woman who just happened to have an iron grip on her emotions. Everyone responded differently to this sort of thing, the woman explained, and thanked her again for her help, told her she did the right thing by calling in, assured her that this sort of thing didn’t happen very often and they would catch the guy who did it, no mistake about that. The policewoman walked her to her door and explained the situation to her mother, who fussed and made Molly a cup of tea and fussed some more. It was kind, but wholly unnecessary.

Molly extracted herself from her parents’ worried gazes by telling them that she was going to take a nice long bath, and that was exactly what she did. She filled the old tub up with steaming water, dunked her feet inside and thought. Doctor Molly Hooper seemed such a long way away. All she could think about was the policeman talking about how it was somebody’s job to stand around inspecting corpses all day. Someone had to do it, he had said.

That someone could be her.

*

It only took a week of working in a morgue for Molly to come to the conclusion that she made the right decision. She felt at home here with the bodies, and she was quick and clever and her boss appreciated the fact instead of seeing her as some sort of odd moral anomaly. This was what she had worked towards all this time, to stand alone here in this well lit room with her books and her documents.

Her boss, Jackie, took her aside one day and said, “I nearly forgot to tell you - you’ll probably be seeing quite a bit of Sherlock Holmes around here.” She laughed. “Actually, this isn’t me telling you, this is a warning.”

“Who’s that?”

“He calls himself a consulting detective - don’t give me that look, I know that’s not a real title and so does everyone else. Anyway, he works with the police and comes round here to make a nuisance of himself. He takes body parts to experiment on and looks at the bodies. Just make sure you get all his paperwork down and don’t hesitate to shoo him out if he’s bothering you.”

Molly considered this. “Why a warning?”

“It’s...” Jackie hesitated, searching for the right words. “You’ll see. Trust me, you’ll understand when you meet him. Just don’t take anything he says personally. Not right in the head, that man.”

“Then why do the police work with him?”

“Because he’s brilliant,” she said with a shrug. “But that doesn’t mean that any of us have to like him. Being smart doesn’t mean a whole lot if you’re a bastard to back it up.”

Molly knew what she expected from this Sherlock Holmes. Probably some weedy little man, head too full of facts to be able to care about human emotion, maybe a little socially awkward, possibly bald. What she didn’t expect was a man to come through the morgue in a whirlwind of motion, all dark curly hair and amazing eyes and all right, quite a nice arse as well. He almost looked a bit alien with those long legs and slender fingers, but in a good way. A very good way.

There was only one thing to do, and that was to gawk.

“Fingers,” he said.

“Uh?”

“Fingers! The spare fingers you’ve got in the fridge, I need them. Now.”

“Aren’t you even going to introduce yourself?” Molly said, stunned.

Sherlock rolled his eyes skywards, as if he were simply taking a moment to curse the very existence of everyday pleasantries between people and said, “Sherlock Holmes.”

“I thought so. I’m--”

“Molly Hooper and you’ve been working here for less than a month, you want to impress your boss so you’ve neglected to tell her that you’ve done the numbers wrong already and you want to fix it yourself. You were training to be a doctor before you came here, and... ah, yes, your parents don’t approve of your being here. And you live alone in a small flat, which is fortunate because the heater has been broken for approximately a week and a half. You do not have a cat, but you feed several strays around your building.”

There were several things Molly wanted to say at this point in time. One was that that, whatever it was, was amazing. The other was that it was unbelievably creepy and she now understood why the man who had worked here before her had merely cited ‘Sherlock Holmes’ as his reason for resignation. Torn between telling him to sod off and asking him out to coffee, she closed her mouth and gave a quick nod. “I’ll get those fingers.”

The next time she exchanged more than a two sentences with Sherlock, she was sitting in the cafeteria, prodding at the uninspired gelatinous blob that had been deemed stew with a certain lack of enthusiasm. It was an unspoken law of cafeterias everywhere that if stew wasn’t made up of gristle and fat, it wasn’t a stew at all. It was still a mystery as to how one could get both of these things with a minimal amount of meat, but it was nevertheless the case. She was pondering this important matter when Sherlock strode over and sat down in front of her. 

“I need to use the morgue.”

“I just went on lunch break.”

If this were a romance, he would probably smile at her and charm her into opening the morgue for him, and then he’d start visiting more often using all sorts of excuses, just to get to see her again. It would be an odd romance to take place in a morgue, but somehow all the more romantic for it. She would puncture that chilly exterior and find the warm heart that lay beneath it, and everyone would be in awe of her patience and nobody would quite understand.

Because this was not a romance, and Sherlock stubbornly refused to adhere to the rules of one, he simply stared at her in a way that made it excessively clear that he did not care that she was on lunch break and that she was just a handy way to get into the morgue. “Have you eaten yet?” She said instead. “You can have some lunch. With me.”

“No.”

Molly waited patiently for an explanation until she realized that one wasn’t going to be provided for her. “Why not?”

“I don’t eat while I’m on a case,” he said in that quick, clipped way of his, words perfectly enunciated and coming out rapid fire. “It’s nothing more than a distraction.”

“But--”

“This,” he said, gesturing to the entirety of his body (which was a very nice opportunity to ogle it, for which she thanked whoever taught Sherlock Holmes how to gesticulate), “is just transportation for _this_.” He put his fingers to his temples.

Suddenly, it clicked. It would be one thing if Sherlock was nothing more than an attractive man with a pompous personality. Molly could get over that as a silly workplace crush, not worth more than a passing thought, but it was more than that. Sherlock was possibly the most brilliant person she had ever met. He understood. This was why he was able to stride in and out of the morgue with all sorts of body parts without batting an eye, why he was able to solve crimes by rooting around dead bodies, why he kept on catching her eye again and again.

He understood. The body was a marvelous thing, but that was all it was. A thing. Transportation. When he had made an assessment of her, cool eyes stripping apart every part of her until she felt as if she were a snake struggling out of its rather plain outer skin, she had half expected him to say, _and you like bodies, you like dead bodies, you think they’re interesting and they don’t bother you one bit which is probably an indication of a disturbed mind_. He probably knew that somehow, but it wasn’t worth commenting on because to Sherlock, that was normal. A silly crush, she could get over, but not this, never this. 

She pushed the tray away and said, “The food here’s rubbish anyway.”

It was a bit foolish jumping at his every whim just because he looked at her a certain way, but Molly found that she didn’t care.

*

The day John Watson came to her attention was the day that Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, genius and self proclaimed high functioning sociopath, became human. The days of Sherlock coming into the morgue alone ended, only to be replaced with Sherlock and John, John and Sherlock. They had quickly become inseparable and Molly couldn’t help but feel a little jealous of that connection, of the fact that John did in a day what she could never do. 

Sherlock’s development into a man of emotion was slow and subtle, but not a lot got past her. She saw quite a bit of people, but no one ever chose to hide while Molly was there, quiet Molly, sweet Molly, timid Molly with her aching smile and quick anxious movements. That was the way she liked it when it came down to it. So instead of talking to Sherlock, she just watched as he pushed John further and further like a wound spring, testing his boundaries, experimenting.

John was so much more than he appeared at first, all grandad-jumpers and kind blue eyes that crinkled at the edges. You had to be sharper than you looked to be with Sherlock for that long, and she wondered if John ever saw anything different in her. Whether he did or not, she and John had an unspoken agreement - they rarely spoke, exchanged pleasantries every so often, but mostly hung back to watch Sherlock. He was a mesmerizing man, and it was nice to finally meet someone that agreed with her.

She moved onto Jim from IT, who was not full of brilliance and sharp edges like Sherlock, but he was nice. That was all he was. He was nice, and liked Toby, and liked to cuddle on the couch and watch bad TV about singing teenagers who appeared to have far more exciting love lives than their own and all right, so maybe she didn’t want nice so much as she wanted interesting, but that was all right. Maybe this was all that she needed. 

It still didn’t take a whole lot for Sherlock to convince her to stay after work for just a half hour longer to do his bidding. He swept into the morgue with John at his heels and Molly slid out the freshest corpse they had that had donated itself to science. She wondered if these poor souls would feel very kindly towards being used in somebody’s flat instead of in a classroom or a laboratory. It didn’t really matter. They were dead.

“This one just got in yesterday,” she found herself saying, unzipping the body bag. “But you can’t have his heart, he donated that to... oh.”

In the background, she could hear Sherlock talking already, walking around the corpse and prying its eyes open to see the state of its whites. “...hugely fat, which means that it’s perfect for identifying the distribution of weight on the balls of his feet, clearly didn’t take very good care of...”

She looked up and saw John’s face. John happened to be the master of poker faces, but unfortunately for him, every one could be decipherable along the spectrum of _did Sherlock just say that?_ to _Sherlock you massive wanker_ to, possibly, _why do I agree to accompany this madman?_. This particular expression was firmly categorized as the second option.

“Sherlock, shut up!” John said, then touched Molly’s shoulder. “Molly knew him. Right?”

Molly nodded. “Not well,” she confessed. “Just well enough to chat for a little while, most days. I didn’t know that he died.”

“This isn’t for a case, so we can come back another day. Someone else can handle this one,” he said, reaching over to the corpse and nudging its eyes closed. John had short, stout fingers and the gentle hands of a doctor. It was a kindness.

“Why?” Sherlock interrupted. “It’s a corpse just like every other.”

John took a deep breath, but Molly held a hand up to stop him. “No, it’s fine. Really.”

John stared at her, stunned. Perhaps he just thought that she was being overly deferential to Sherlock again. “Really,” she said again. “It’s very sad that he died, but it’s just a corpse.” She rested her hands on the edge of the metal table and looked over at Sherlock. “Just transportation. Right?”

John raised a hand in the air, about to speak, then lowered it in consternation. “Right,” he said, not really believing it, not really believing her. “I... I am going to get some coffee. Can I get you a cup, Molly?”

“Yes please,” she said, feeling the weight of Sherlock’s attention on her. “Cream and sugar.”

Once John left, Sherlock spoke. “Interesting. If it were me on that slab, would you feel the same?”

From anyone else, it would be a loaded question, wondering how Molly could be so heartless, hoping that she would at least cry a little bit over their corpse. From Sherlock, it was sheer curiosity. As good as John was for the man, Molly knew that there was still a sort of sadness to him, a rattling emptiness that nothing could properly fill, not even a friend like John Watson.

“I--I don’t want you to die, Sherlock,” she said. “I’d be very sad. Of course I would be.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

She looked Sherlock in the eye and saw that for once, he was looking at her but not seeing her, not seeing her at all. It occurred to her that he wasn’t wondering about her feelings, but John’s. In theory, it made sense. Both her and John had dealings in a hospital with corpses, dead through causes both natural and unnatural. She felt like telling him that if he was looking for a typical reaction, he had asked the wrong person. Her jaw worked as she traced her teeth with her tongue, one at a time. 

She could lie, but it wouldn’t matter. He’d be able to tell. 

A body without its mind was worthless. Without the synapses firing behind shut eyes, all Sherlock would be was an attractive corpse, a pile of flesh and muscles and bones, but nothing of any consequence. Could she work on Sherlock’s corpse, strip it open and see the organs inside that had once made him tick? She could never understand his mind, but could she understand his body, could she learn every square inch of him, this man that had captured her and understood her? Yes. She could.

“Yes,” she said. “I would.”

*  
Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, then, that months and months later, it was Molly Sherlock went to in his hour of need. She had never been much good for romance, wasn’t the voice on his phone, couldn’t make sure he ate and drank properly, couldn’t defend him from the police, but she could do this. Beneath the soft clothes and the vain attempts at trying to meet people and the awkward way she stumbled over her words and being pushed around and _letting_ herself be pushed around, Molly Hooper had a core of steel.

“If I wasn’t everything that you think I am, everything I think I am, would you still want to help me?” Those were Sherlock’s exact words.

Molly knew that Sherlock was exactly who she thought he was, someone brilliant and hurt and abnormal, someone who understood. Which was why when he reached out, the answer was clear.

“What do you need?”


End file.
